Four short links: 11 July 2018

You are your Metadata: Identification and Obfuscation of Social Media Users using Metadata Information -- We demonstrate that through the application of a supervised learning algorithm, we are able to identify any user in a group of 10,000 with approximately 96.7% accuracy. Moreover, if we broaden the scope of our search and consider the 10 most likely candidates, we increase the accuracy of the model to 99.22%. We also found that data obfuscation is hard and ineffective for this type of data: even after perturbing 60% of the training data, it is still possible to classify users with an accuracy higher than 95%. (via Wired UK)

Building a Program Synthesizer -- Build a program synthesis tool, to generate programs from specifications, in 20 lines of code using Rosette. I'm interested in work people are doing to automatically create software. Like this example, most packages are still in a math-like larval stage. It's going to be interesting once they cross from "looks like a 1980s AI course" to "looks like Gmail".

Nat Torkington has been active in web development since the early days of the web. He wrote the bestselling Perl Cookbook, and chaired conferences for O'Reilly Media for a decade. During his time at O'Reilly Media, Nat was an editor and then became a trend-spotter for the O'Reilly Radar group, identifying the topics to build events and books around. He has worked in areas as diverse as networking, publishing, science, edtech, and NLP. He now lives in New Zealand, where he runs Kiwi Foo Camp and helps startups grow.